So now, if I hadn’t spent much of the week waiting for two of the three county commissioners to get back to me (ahem) for a story I’m working on for Sunday, I might have liked to swing by the Millersville Holocaust conference, which continues today. As noted here on several occasions, not only am I studying history but I’m particularly fascinated by World War II, the most cataclysmic event in human history, and in particular the end of the war, as retribution came home to Germany. Deserved retribution, taken on the whole; taken on a smaller, more individual level, a lot of women and a lot of children wound up being punished and killed for Germany’s sins. And whatever their countrymen did, those stories are just hard to read.

Lots more after the jump.

In any event, it both fascinates and frightens me that so cultured, so educated a country could fall into the abyss the way Germany did; makes you think the same thing could happen here. But then again, it’s hard to grasp the psychological state of the German people at the time of the Nazis’ rise to power; the trauma of losing World War I, the subsequent financial chaos and descent (as far as many ordinary Germans were concerned) into the depravity of Weimar culture is hard for us to understand all these years later, all these miles away. It justifies nothing; but it explains much.

Which brings us to Dave O’Connor’s brief piece in the Era yesterday, but more specifically the reaction to it. O’Connor quotes one of the scholars who spoke yesterday of the “good Germans” and how they permitted and supported Hitler’s rise to power. It brought a response in the brief thread:

Dislike for the Jews was based on their influence on Germany during the Weimer period. Many of the things solid Germans saw as corrupting influences were the spheres the Jews were over represented in.

We should perhaps wonder about the spirit in which this comment was made. But the thing is, factually - this is correct.

One of the books we’re reading this semester is Niall Ferguson’s “War of the World,” which goes into great detail about the ethnic and racial hatreds that fueled both World War II and most of the other, deadliest wars of the 20th century. And one of the things I liked about the book is that Ferguson didn’t just dismiss the German animosity for the Jews as the Germans going cccrrrraaaazzzzzzy. Which they did; he too reiterated that there is no justification. But there is indeed an explaination:

By this time [1893] it was not only as financiers that Jews were coming under attack, though it is noteworthy that 31 percent of the richest families in Germany were Jewish and 22 percent of all Prussian millionaires. German Jews were also strikingly better represented among professionals than among entrepreneurs or business executives. Jews might account for fewer than one in every hundred Germans; but by the second quarter of the twentieth century one in nine German doctors was a Jew, and one in six lawyers. There were also above-average numbers of Jews working at newspaper editors, journalists, theatre directors and academics. … Anti-semitism, then, was sometimes nothing more than the envy of under-achievers.

But at the same time, Ferguson notes that there was another aspect to how Jews were perceived in Germany, because of the influx off “Ostjuden,” immigrants from the east:

By 1914 around a quarter of the Jews in Germany were defined as foreign or Eastern (which included those who originated in the borderland provinces of Upper Silesia and Posen). Relatively poor, Orthodox in their faith, Yiddish in their speech, the so-called Ostjuden elicited much the same response among German Jews as among German Gentiles: disquiet, bordering on revulsion.

Again: This isn’t something coming from Stormfront, but rather from an eminent historian and his New York Times bestseller.

So the Jews, in Germany, were perceived by many to be both too powerful and contemptibly weak. At a time of economic (and so far as some Germans were concerned, moral) crisis, it’s perhaps easier to understand how people perceived them as some sort of unique threat.

Then add to that something I read in Gunther Grass’s novel “Crabwalk” last night, which itself is an account of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in which some 9,000 Germans fleeing the Russian advance died, the worst sea disaster in history. The boat was named after a small-time Nazi functionary who gained immortality after he was assassinated in Switzerland by one David Frankfurter. Frankfurter was Jewish; and when asked why he did it, he said, according to Grass: Because I am a Jew.

Now, think about that. You’re a Jew living in Berlin, or anywhere in the Reich; you’re persecuted, you’re hoping all that can be defused, but of course you’re angry about it too. And then a Jew succumbs to that understandable anger and lashes out, and proclaims that he did it because he was Jewish.

Well. Didn’t the Nazis say the Jews were murderous? A self-fulfilling prophecy, in other words, one which would be repeated when Herschel Grynszpan would assassinate Ernst von Rath in 1938.

It’s important to understand these things, I think, even though in attempting to do so you can walk that tightrope between explaination and justification. Nothing justifies what happened; nothing at all ever can. But just as we hear after the individual criminal commits a murder (what a terrible childhood he had; how underpriveleged he was), so too are there factors behind Germany’s crime, factors that may have in their eyes justified it. But those eyes were blinded to reality. Ours, we must make sure, never are.